Haaave you met Jane Goodall?!

…I have! On last Friday during the annual “Roots&Shoots” festival that was held at the Gezhi Highschool in the centre of Shanghai. The festival started at 3 pm. From 3 to 5 pm we had do help at several workshops and at the registration. I myself had to “help” at a “Do-it-Yourself” T-shirt design workshop. But in the end my help was not needed and I only stood around doing nothing. Actually was this “DIY” workshop a contest what I didn’t know till the end ;-)

During those workshops Dr. Jane Goodall visit several activities and presentations by school classes or sub-organizations of “Roots&Shoots”. It was quite funny walking next to her and she was friendly to everybody and very, very interested in all the volunteers work.

But of course the best thing about her visiting our organization (actually it is hers) was her speech she gave at 6 pm. Before she started several volunteers or programs were awarded and an introduction was given. We celebrated the 50^th anniversary of Jane Goodalls “Gombe” chimpanzees project in Tanzania and the 11^th anniversary of “Roots&Shoots – Shanghai”. In a short video the “Gombe” project was explained with wonderful pictures of Jane Goodall in the Tanzanian jungle.

Afterwards her speech FINALLY started. Jane Goodall is now 76 years old and you can see that she has been up in the world her whole life, but as soon as she starts to speak I forgot about her being about four times older than I am. She still has a very nice sense of humors and she started with some little jokes. But when she came to environmental protection something changed both in her eyes and her voice. She became serious and not just an addressing, faking serious but an honest and purely concerned serious. As I looked in her eyes I saw that she meant every single word coming out of her mouth like it was meant to be. I can imagine that she really puts her lifeblood in all of her projects. One of her points was that there is no line between animals/the nature and human beings.

As simple as it sounds and even widely used (too often for my taste) her main message was: Never give up! Because it’s so often used it starts to kinda annoy me but as Jane Goodall said it I really thought that this is the right way of dealing with environmental protection. Maybe it is the way with it you should deal with everything but it still had in some strange way an impact on me when Dr. Jane Goodall said this. To encourage us all she gave a wonderful example: When you seed just a little grain after some time it is growing ROOTS and SHOOTS. Those tiny little roots manage to get to the water deep down in the earth and on their way down into the earth they are so powerful that they can even move rocks. It´s the same when you look at the shoots. As small and tiny this shoot might be in the end it is able to burst through the soil, even when it´s full of rocks. The “moral” of this story connected with the “Never give up” stuff she said made her attempt to “rescue” the environment very clear.

When I arrived in Shanghai at first I wasn’t sure if my work in a NGO would have any impact but after Jane Goodalls speech I had hope that I can do something helpful. In the end I even got to touch her arm when we had a group picture with many volunteers…I felt very enlighten after I touched her arm ;-)

If I was seriously inspired by Jane Goodall or not and if I really can have an impact in some way…we will see when I start to work! So be tensed about tomorrow’s first working day reportJ

Cheers!

L.